


How to Survive a Nomadic Childhood; Also How to Sway the Odds in Your Favor (By Ezra P. Standish

by LedByTHeUnknown



Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Memoirs, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 17:19:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4230303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LedByTHeUnknown/pseuds/LedByTHeUnknown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Introduction<br/>	I Ezra P. Standish have never considered myself an author but current and past situations have led me to have a want to impart my knowledge and experiences on those of you that may find yourself in the same situations and predicaments that I myself have once been in. I do not consider this a book rather a paper, a guide if you will, for one to read and see that you may not be as alone as I felt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In the Beginning

I was born, according to records on September 9th 1962, to a jet-setting mother. She was never married to my father and I do not even know the man’s first name just his last name Standish. Even then I do not know if that is true. There are no baby pictures of me save for a small 3X5 of my aunt Regina and I at a county fair when I was about 5 months old. I am sitting by the winning pumpkin. It is four times bigger than my small frame. I lost track of the physical picture later in life but the mental memory remains. 

My first memory is a flash of day sitting in the sandbox in a park in Baton Rouge. All I know is that I did not like it. My first real full memory is mother leaving me yet again. We had just finished doing something in Atlanta and now she was leaving me with a new face. Called him Uncle Nestor he lived in a brick townhouse in Shreveport. I hated staying there. I was there for six months, a lifetime to a five year old. I got my first skinned knee there, as well as my first stitches and my first broken bone, all within three weeks. It was hard work cleaning out those gutters but they had to be cleaned out. Nestor needed the money but he was not about to climb the ladders and do it. Mother came to pick me up and was horrified not that I had been hurt (cast was long gone) but that the doctor who stitched up my arm left a scar. However, she did use that to our advantage on or next job. 

Yes, my mother was a con artist. Though I did not know that until I was about twelve, though I knew what she was doing was wrong from the time I was seven. Nevertheless, at that time a timid little five year old, I did everything I could to make my mother happy. Deep in my young brain, I just figured that if I made her happy enough I could stay with her and she would not keep on leaving. Most of my aunts were nice and caring but I still felt the big hole in my being that only my mother could fill. 

At such a young age, I did not know that there was anything different about me, that I was not leading a normal life. I though every child lived this strange nomadic life. I did not really have any comparison. I never saw a TV until I was nine. I was always playing in a backyard by myself or reading, or helping an aunt in the kitchen; my hidden talent, baking exquisite pies and cakes. 

It was in this stage that I also learned to like the finer things in life. Good food, and yes I will admit a taste of good wine from an aunt in New Orleans who was from France and believed that there was nothing wrong with kids drinking wine at meal time. I never needed preschool or kindergarten as my Uncle Jefferson in Tallahassee taught me to read when I was three. He along with my mother also taught me my numbers. I learned how to count playing blackjack, thirty-one and cribbage. I started learning my colors from racing silks, I knew more about horses then I did about common house pets. When I was six I had my first horse for all of two weeks till my mother divorced that man and we left. I really like that man, feel bad I cannot remember his name; he was one of my mother’s nicest men.


	2. The School Years

When I was six my mother hulled me off back to Atlanta.

I was to stay with Aunt Doris, and I was enrolled in grade one at Deo Preparatory School of GA. There I discovered I was not like other children I was not normal. I did not have a dad (some others did not either but their fathers had passed away) and I did not even have a mother really. I talked differently I had a wide vocabulary for a first grader. I did not read comics or watch cartoons. I liked reading. I did not know how to play snakes and ladders or candy land; and none of my classmates had even heard of poker, or blackjack or faro. And when I went to birthday parties I did not know row, row, row your boat or who the heck the Beatles were (though when I learned I loved them instantly) I knew Mahler, Beethoven, Chopin, and Mozart. I just did not fit in. By grade three I was now enrolled in a private school in San Antonio and I was still an outcast and age 8 I did not belong anywhere. All the adults in my life wanted me to be with kids my own age, but the other 8 year olds thought 

I acted like an old person. Therefore, I kept to myself. By grade, seven I was back in Atlanta but not to a private school. Mother did not have time to register me formally so I was shuffled off to a public school, no uniforms so we got to wear what we liked. Disco was big, bell-bottoms and afros. Yes I dressed like that, to blend in, I just wanted to make it through school with no trouble. I never went to dances I did not listen to the Bee Gees or Donna Summer. I liked The Who, and I liked Led Zeppelin but I was still considered an outsider as I still was not in to TV, and I listened to my classic music, I was labeled a geek. A band geek, I had taught myself to play the piano and the flute. I coasted; I did junior high and my freshman year of high school in three different cities. And every time I got to know someone I would have to move, happened in elementary too, I learned not to make friends early I had acquaintances yes but friends no. it was too hard to leave them behind. 

By grade 11 it was 1979 and punk was taking off. I myself never liked or embraced the punk culture, meanwhile the entire student body of my new high school in Buffalo New York did. Mother temporarily ran out of aunts and uncles in the south and had a friend up there. I did not fit in at all I was still in the attire of the dying decade and starting to embrace some of the styles from the new wave fashions that were starting to emerge from the coming decade. 

The fight I had with the lead asshole bully of the school was not my first fight (have had many schoolyard scraps in elementary) but it was the worst fight I was in at that time. I won but I walked away with possible broken ribs, a badly bruised cheek and my very first dislocated shoulder. I never told my caregiver the truth and I never sought out a doctor (hence the not knowing the extent of the injury to my side though the bruise was quite large and painful). In hindsight letting an acquaintance of mine from the student council relocate my shoulder was not the best thing, it never did heal right and will still come out with not much effort to this day. 

People left me alone after that. Even the acquaintances I had were not too sure how to act around me. I was intelligent but I was able to fight. The gym teacher who broke up the fight suggested I channel that ability into a proper fighting style. That is when I took up boxing Tuesdays Thursdays I was at the gym for two hours before and four hours after school. On Saturdays I was there almost all day. I had fights and I won a lot, not all but enough. It killed me when I had to move again for grade 12. Back to Atlanta. But the gym owner knew a guy in Atlanta and I was enrolled in his gym. Mother never fully did approve of my boxing but certainly saw it’s potential for the future.

While I worked out I was still a slimmer guy. And having to go back to that same public school I left before I was ready for them. I found out I could make whatever money I needed by challenging the biggest guys in class to a fight. I made wagers and I would nine times out of ten win. I was able to keep making money as I would pull in those I beat into the operation, so while I was making money they were too and so never let it slip that I was a trained boxer. The gym owner found out and I was suspended from the gym till I stopped. I moved from cheating at fighting to cheating my fellow students at cards. It was around that time that the guidance counselors started talking about university. I then realized that I did not know what I wanted to do with my life. I didn`t know who I wanted to be. But it was then that I realized by going to university I could live on my own, I wouldn’t have to keep moving. I could settle. I looked at all my options and settled on the University of Georgia in Atlanta. It was the city that most felt like home. I got in. and a new chapter started


End file.
